Elder Jonathan Turley: December 8, 2014

Hello Parents --

So this week turned out to be a little bit interesting. As y'all know, we had planned for Anna to be baptized this past week, but apparently it wasn't her time because every time we go over to her house, we try and talk to the dad and ask him to talk to the mom, and he still hasn't talked to her. It's really sad because baptism is something that she really wants to do, and her dad just isn't doing his part. Her dad says that he is down for her to get baptized, but he isn't showing it.

It's been a sad week as far as baptisms go. So Friday we went to do service for a poor family who was going to be baptized on the 10th of December by Elder Frost and Elder Singer, but when we got there for our service project we saw that Elder Frost and Elder Singer where having a deep discussion with them. So apparently that very night, they had gotten into a pretty big fight and they decided to call off their wedding and then their baptism. It's super sad, right? So we all ended up speaking to them and trying to get the wife to rethink the whole thing, because by them doing calling off their wedding and their baptism, they were all losing so many blessings -- like family blessings, Temple blessing, and so on and so forth. It was super sad because this family, which has a lot of people in it, are now losing everything they have worked on simply because a few mean words were said. It was just so hard to watch, because you could tell the wife was closed on everything that the husband had to say, and anything he was saying was just awful to her because she had already planned to leave him. Anyway, this was just so super sad.

Other than the cancelled baptisms, we did do a lot of service this week. On Thursday, we had a service project planned out with the Elders and the young men and women. It was definitely interesting. We entered the room and right when we got there they handed us sand paper and were like so ya we are going to sand off the old paint and then repaint the house. So that was pretty interesting. We ended up sanding about half the house by hand -- which was frustrating because there is for sure more efficient way of doing it. Then it was time to paint. So Paraguayans don't really know how to paint houses really well, it's all about "less is more" for them. It was kind of crazy because it turns out one bag of paint works with two gallons of water, but this family decided that they were going to use that one bag of paint for eight gallons of water. Basically the paint was way too watery, but nobody seemed to care, they were super happy with the way things were turning out. So the missionaries kind of took charge of everything and told them they needed more paint and less water, but it turns out we didn't have enough paint. So it was turning out that we pretty much had orange walls with a super watered down green coat of paint. We ended up using a ton of coats of paint just to try and cover the wall up and make it look nice, but then the people were coming in and saying "You all paint like girls, go faster." So we went into the room that they were painting to see what it looked like, and it looked like someone had had an accident all over the wall and then painted it in like green highlighter. So ... this week I learned the importance of actually using correct measurements when doing house projects. :)

So yeah, this week was quite eventful. We worked hard and got a lot done, and helped people to come to the Lord. Oh, one good thing I forgot to mention is that Gregoria and her family were inactive for a little while, but they came to church this week, so that was super cool. We have been working hard with the menos activos (less actives ... there are 450 people in our ward and only 100 come), so it was nice to see our work paying off ... I love it, it's such a great feeling.

I sure love y'all and hope y'all are doing well.

Elder Turley

Elder Turley with Elder Luke